


you're the lucky ones

by defcontwo



Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Batman!Cass, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:22:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not how Batman and Robin are supposed to go but they're papering over the cracks and they're making it up as they go along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're the lucky ones

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt: DCU, Cassandra Cain + Tim Drake, we pull our boots on with both hands/but we can't punch ourselves awake

They are on the brink of something nasty and brutal - Cass can taste it in the air, the winds of change and something cloying and suffocating, a sign that in true Gotham form, it’s always going to get worse before it gets better. 

The weight of Bruce’s memory falls on all of her brothers differently but it is a weight nonetheless, one that she sees in the lines on their faces and in the heaviness of their posture. There is something here about fathers and sons and honoring legacies. They have all of them convinced themselves that they should take up the mantle when the mantle is something that none of them have ever wanted. 

But she wants it. This she knows without a shadow of a doubt. She has always wanted it - to be Batman feels right for her. It feels like a natural progression of the path that she’s placed herself upon. 

Now she needs to let the rest of them know before it all goes to hell. 

+

She visits her brothers in turn. 

Jason is the wild card, the ticking time bomb, and the one that she is most worried about. They haven't even met but from the rumblings she's gotten from Oracle, he's not handling Bruce's death well, not by a long shot. 

She lets herself into his hideout quietly and observes him from behind. She sees the tense lines in his back, and she hopes that she does not alienate him further, this brother of hers that she only knows through whispered stories and a myth propped up behind a pane of class. 

"Jason," she says, and he startles, turning around with a curse. 

"Fucking shit who - oh. It's you." 

"You know who I am," Cass says, and it is a clarification more than it is an actual question. 

"Cassandra Cain. Second Batgirl and the late Bruce Wayne's third wayward adoptee," Jason says, and he is trying inject a certain level of carelessness, of apathy into his tone but he's missed it by about a mile. Looking at him now, she sees how he is so much a conflicting mixture of grief and rage. She sees that as much as he may want the rage to win out, it is the grief that's ruling him. 

"To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"I wanted to talk," Cass says. "I am - I want to be Batman." 

She expects - she's not quite sure what she expects. She thinks she expects some measure of condescension, an accusation that she can't do it. She doesn't expect Jason to stare at her for minutes on end, as if looking hard enough will help him figure her out. 

Maybe it will, it works for her well enough. 

He runs a hand through his dark, curly hair and gives a rueful smile that surprises her. "All right. You gonna give me a lecture on how to run my business, Batman?" 

"Unnecessary. Tim already had that talk with you." 

Jason snorts. "Yeah, he told me to _do good_."

"So do good," Cass says, pushing up the window that she'd entered through and slipping back out onto the fire escape. 

"What if that's not who I am anymore?" Jason calls out. 

Cass shakes her head. "Not true." 

\+ 

Dick and Damian are next; they make an odd pair as the older brother trying to play father to a young and unwilling brother. 

“How will that even work, Cain,” Damian spits out, all vim and vigor and a shade of something ugly in his tone, like he doesn’t think she’s good enough. 

“The same way it always works,” Cass says, coolly, because she expected this from him and sees no particular need to rise to it. 

Dick just laughs and shakes his head, lets out a sigh of relief and a “thank _God_.”

+

Cass seeks out Tim last, Tim who would be her partner and her Robin, because she already knows his answer. “What do you say, Robin?” 

Tim meets her eyes and smiles a little crookedly. “No one better for the job, Batman.” 

\+ 

Tim works for weeks on end creating and improving upon her new suit. She wonders if he realizes how transparent he's being in his thoroughness. He is visibly reluctant to go out with her as Batman and Robin until every last detail has been checked and double checked. 

He is the only Robin who ever lost his Batman and the gravity of this, of how completely Tim is convinced of his own failure, is coloring every move he makes. She finds herself missing his nerdy jokes and his gentle teasing, and wonders what she has to do to bring that Tim back. 

The circles under his eyes and his manic dedication to detail paint a picture more worrying than any of the others combined. 

Not that it's surprising. That he is up and about, walking and talking and fighting is a testament to how strong Tim is in the face of everything. She knows this because she has that same hollowed out feeling, that same sense that every morning when she wakes up, she must remind herself of the way things are now and she must heave herself out of bed and get on with it. 

She is still grieving for the lost father as much as she is still grieving for Stephanie - for all that Steph is alive and whole and back in their lives, there is some part of them that hasn't quite gotten over it. For the two of them, Steph's brush with death is a shared wound that may never entirely heal. 

Just when she is wondering if there are any good words to tell Tim that this has gone on long enough, he calls her up and tells her that the suit is finally finished. 

The suit is more everything - more kevlar, more cape, and more of that deep shade of black that blends so well into Gotham’s shadows. He retrofits the cowl for her shape and size and improves upon the utility belt while he’s at it and when Cass tries it on for the first time, she knows that she looks well and truly terrifying. 

“You’re gonna scare the shit out of people more than you already do,” Tim says. He's laughing a little, wild eyed and proud of his work. They're going to be okay, Cass realizes. 

She grins and turns to look at herself in the mirror to find that it’s exactly as unnerving as she would expect it to be beneath the cowl as she says, “that’s the idea, Robin.” 

\+ 

This is how it goes: 

Batman, slight and silent and deadly as she sneaks in from the shadows. Robin, the tap-tap of a bo staff against brick the only warning you get before he's got his boots in your face. 

Tim is in no mood for quips and Cass is in no mood to fill the silence with chatter. They are hard edges and sharp corners and a distinctive flair that anyone in the know would recognize as _Shiva_. 

It's unsettling, Commissioner Gordon says. It's downright goddamn creepy, Harvey Bullock says. 

What the hell do you two think you're doing, Catwoman says. 

It's not how Batman and Robin are supposed to go but they're papering over the cracks and they're making it up as they go along. 

For all that Cass has been concerned about Tim's well-being, his ability to do the job is never compromised. From sundown to sunrise, he walls off everything else and leaves room for nothing but the mission. She watches him take down cartels and then comfort arson victims all in a matter of hours, and every night, she is glad that she has him as her Robin because he needs this as much as she needed Batman. 

Contained within the two of them, their partnership functions smoothly, unorthodox but easy and comfortable. 

It's everything else around them that's giving them trouble. 

\+ 

The few first weeks they go out are a nightmare. Criminal activity has swelled in Bruce’s absence and it’s all anyone can do to hold it back. The big names know that something’s up, that their usual opposition is nowhere to be seen, presumed dead, and they react about as well as a shark released into bloody water. 

No one knows what to make of Cass and even less take her seriously. They call her an impostor, they call her Batgirl, they call her Batwoman - for all that Steph has already been seen out and about leaving her own mark on the Batgirl name, for all that Kate Kane has already carved out space of her own as Batwoman. She is a confusing entity, a change that Gotham refuses to wrap its mind around, and it is infuriating. 

She tries not to let it get to her but the line between what she knows she's capable of and how much she is able to accomplish with the way things are now is ever widening. 

“Should have seen this one coming,” Tim says, tugging off his gauntlets to run his hands through his hair, annoyed. “People are so stupid.” 

“They’ll learn,” Cass says because she has to, because she refuses to let herself think otherwise. This has to work because there is no other option. 

“It’ll take some time but they’ll learn.”

Tim snorts disbelievingly and she knows it is not a slight against her so much as it is his lack of belief in Gotham's relative human intelligence, so Cass reaches out a hand and hits him upside the head. 

"Have a little faith, Robin." 

It is only later, in the safety of Steph's room, her feet drawn up to her chest on the bed, that she lets out all of her insecurities come streaming out in fits and starts as she struggles to find the words for everything that she wants to say. 

"What if I can't do this?" Cass says, blowing out a breath and banging her head back on the headboard. 

Steph is quiet for a minute and then, "do you remember how after you beat Shiva, you were pretty much unconscious for a few days?"

"Yes." 

"Do you remember how I had to go take down that nutjob in your place who wanted to be killed by the person who beat Shiva?"

"Yes?" 

"Do you know how I did that? Because I'm not an idiot, in terms of training at that point, that dude was way out of my league, Cass." 

"How?" 

"I thought of you. I asked myself, what would Cass do? Because you know what, Cass. I don't think there's anything you're not capable of if you put your mind to it. I think, and no offense to the dude's memory and all that, but I think you could be a better Batman than Bruce ever was," Steph says, stripping off the outer layer of the Batgirl costume, and hopping up onto the bed next to Cass. 

"You think he didn't have a hard time being taken seriously when he started out? Like, Cass, come on. He was a guy going around dressed as a bat. That kinda thing takes a while to get some traction." 

Cass leans her head on Steph's shoulder and breathes in deep the vanilla scent of the other girl's shampoo, and she is blown away a little by how profoundly grateful she is to have Steph back in her life again. "You're a good Batgirl, you know," she says at last. 

Steph reaches over and pokes Cass in the cheek. "Holy obvious subject change, Batman." 

"I can do this," Cass says and let's herself believe it. 

"Damn straight," Steph says. 

+

And the thing of it is, Steph was right. 

Cass can't pinpoint exactly when the shift happens, when the city stops seeing her as the girl trying to become Batman and when it starts seeing her as Batman, as blood and bruised flesh and the flash of a batarang in the night. 

But shift it does. 

The cops stop staring when she arrives at a crime scene. Jim Gordon stops looking surprised when he turns on the beacon and gets her instead of a big, looming man in the Bat suit. The first time a would-be bank robber takes off running down an alleyway at the sight of her screaming, "run, it's the Batman," Tim gives her a high five and then chases him down. 

Oracle buzzes in her ear, the comm-link coming to life. "Batman, we've got a mass breakout at Black Gate, we're gonna need you two front and center and I'll send in backup." 

"You get that, Robin?" Cass asks. 

"Sure did, Batman," Tim says, with a smile that's coming easier and easier to him with each passing day. 

"Think we should take care of it?" She asks, putting on a bit of a show of it as Tim folds up his bo staff and attaches it to his belt. 

"Guess we should. Kinda our job, right?" 

"On three, Robin?"

"As always, I await your signal, Batman." 

"One. Two. Three."

And they're off.


End file.
